At this year's Spring IDF, Derek Wilson, Johan De Gelas and I all sat across the table from Intel's Justin Rattner and asked him a question that had been on our minds ever since Prescott's introduction. The question went something like this:

Recently, Intel has shifted their focus away from ramping clock speed to increasing performance through other means such as exploiting TLP (Thread Level Parallelism). Given that Intel's direction today seems to be in sharp contrast to the direction of the NetBurst architecture and especially the direction of Prescott, were the past five years of microarchitecture improvements and innovations essentially a waste?